South Carolina Republicans aim for Mark Sanford rematch

Round One of Mark Sanford’s comeback bid is expected to go to the disgraced ex-South Carolina governor. The real action in Tuesday’s special congressional primary in The Palmetto State is for second place — and the right to take on Sanford mano a mano in an April 2 GOP runoff.

More than a dozen candidates are duking it out. And most of the fire in the fight for No. 2 is trained on Teddy Turner, son of media mogul Ted Turner.

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The race’s cast of characters is worthy of a Hollywood drama: from Sanford, who’s seeking redemption after his embarrassing 2009 downfall; to Turner, who’s done everything he can to distance himself from his liberal dad; to Elizabeth Colbert Busch, the sister of comedian Stephen Colbert, who’s expected to skate to a primary win on the Democratic side.

Sanford is all but assured of finishing first in the Republican primary thanks to his name ID, but he’s unlikely to eclipse the 50-percent mark needed to win outright. That’s meant lots of attention for Turner, but not often the kind he’d prefer.

One mailer, from Republican rival John Kuhn, accused Turner of “living off” his father’s wealth and claimed that his father once “fired” Turner from CNN. The mailer also called liberal actress Jane Fonda, one of Ted Turner’s ex-wives, “a big influence” in Teddy Turner’s life.

Another Republican candidate, Chip Limehouse, aired a TV ad saying that Turner “ran three businesses into the ground [and] duped investors out of $1.5 million.”

And last week, a seven-year-old police report surfaced on a widely read South Carolina political website, FITSnews, that said Turner once kicked in his ex-wife’s door because she didn’t initially give him consent to take their children with him on a trip to Africa.

For a state known for its hard-charging political culture, the battle for the Lowcountry seat that Tim Scott vacated when he was appointed to the Senate had been a fairly tame affair. But that has changed in the final days leading to the primary.

Turner has spent nearly $300,000 of his own money and received widespread publicity largely because of his last name. Internal polls from several of the campaigns show him in strong contention for second place. But operatives from opposing campaigns said they concluded that the first-time candidate Turner was an inviting target because his support was soft.

Turner, for his part, told POLITICO that the attacks are evidence he’s gaining steam. He said he’s winning support from voters hungry to support a political newcomer.

Still, he seemed taken aback by the broadsides, which he called “pretty ridiculous.”

Particularly jarring, he said, were the barbs linking him to his father, an outspoken environmentalist who backed President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign and who has a history of supporting liberal causes. Turner has somewhat awkwardly distanced himself from his father’s political views — he told one Republican audience last month that “you can’t help who your parents are.”

He’s even taken pains to tell voters that Fonda — who as a face of the Vietnam War protest movement was known as “Hanoi Jane” — is not his mother.

“This stuff,” he said of the efforts to tie him to his father, “is just grasping at straws.”

Still, Turner seems to be taking the last-minute missiles seriously. Turner’s campaign was worried enough that he released a TV ad accusing his opponents of waging a “shameful, negative campaign” against him, and it sent out a lengthy email to reporters knocking down the Limehouse and Kuhn attacks and calling them “full of lies and distortions.”